Quality Assurance Certification vs. Lean vs. TQM vs. Six Sigma

Summary
Most of the entrepreneurs get puzzled over quality assurance, lean, TQM, and six sigma. In this article, we are going to tell you the differences among these business tools.

Many experts dealing with quality assurance, lean, TQM, and six sigma over the years, have admitted that all of these business tools are simply great. All management terms may drift in and out of favor; they may get changed, manipulated, even criticized sometimes; still, the experts can deny the efficiency of these tools. Most of the entrepreneurs don’t have a fair understanding of these tools. They often get confused among them and pick one that is not suitable for the business. This article is going to discuss each of these four business tools- quality assurance certification, lean, TQM, and six-sigma on-by-one.

Let’s start with ISO 9001 Quality Management Systems or Quality Assurance Standard:

Quality Assurance Standard

ISO 9001 is one of the most popular international standards in the trade and commerce world. This standard requires an efficacious Quality Management System or QMS. This system should cover all the systems and business processes running in an organization. It provides a framework that suggests a series of requirements, which are internationally acknowledged. These requirements intend to help an organization meet the requirements of the customers and stakeholders.

When an organization has implemented a QMS, it is important to involve an independent certification body to audit the system and issue the organization ISO 9001 certificate. Quality management certification is all about the customers. Most of the customers are looking for quality. Hence, when it is certified that a particular organization is providing quality products or services, then no doubt it will drive the sales.

The International Organization for Standardization or ISO tends to update the standards in every seven to eight years. Therefore, an organization should also upgrade its certification whenever any change in the standard takes place. Otherwise, it would become invalid. Hence, an organization should always update its system along with the release of a new version of the ISO 9001 standard is released. Many ISO quality consulting services help an organization to adopt the changes and maintain the validity of the certification.

Lean

Do you know what your customers consider as valuable? The main purpose of “Lean” principles is to reveal what the customers consider valuable. These principles also try to help an organization to stop doing the things that add no value to the customer satisfaction. It minimizes the costs keeping the quality as same as the expensive ones. Lean emphasizes on the optimization of the flow of the products or services offered by an organization across all the horizontal value streams.

By identifying the wastes and the reasons working behind the wastes, an organization can easily remove them. It reduces the requirements of space, human resources, capital, and time. In its earlier days, lean was applied to manufacturing industry only. Now, this business tool is applied by all the business, regardless of the diversities of several industries.

A question may pop up in this context. What is the driver here? Well, here the driver is the senior team management that can analyze the business processes to find out what wrong is going on and to rectify the mistakes. When Quality Assurance Certification focuses on how to elevate the quality and meet the customer satisfaction, lean principles try to find out what should not be and which areas need improvement.

Total Quality Management

Total Quality Management or TQM refers to a framework based on the principles every employee in an organization must follow to maintain operations led by the organization. It was a popular business approach in the 1980s and 1990s. Now, it has lost its charm as well as the efficiency. TQM was based on the principle of enhancing customer satisfaction. It was modeled on the Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) approach. Seven main elements of TQM include:

• Cause and effect diagram
• Checksheet
• Control Chart
• Histogram
• Pareto Chart
• Scatter diagram
• Stratification

In the context of TQM approach, the driving force is always the management team.

Six Sigma

The concept of Six Sigma has replaced TQM. It can be defined by statistical process control and capability that intends to build up a reject rate of fewer than 3.4 defects per million opportunities. It is a series of tools and techniques that help an organization in process improvement. The main focus of this concept is on further improvement. Here the driver is the senior management.

The tools discussed above are more or less similar. However, context marks the difference. An organization that requires customer satisfaction should look for QMS instead of Six Sigma. ON the other hand, an organization that is experiencing obstacles in further improvement should consider six sigma primarily. The senior management of an organization should pick the right business tool as per the requirements of the organization.